


Lost and Found

by bookishandbossy



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Amnesia, F/M, Fluff and Angst, background trip/skye, it's kind of sad for a while but then I promise it gets better, post-season 1 finale AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-11
Updated: 2014-08-29
Packaged: 2018-02-12 17:56:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 17,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2119317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookishandbossy/pseuds/bookishandbossy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Who would Fitz be without Simmons?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Hello Goodbye

When he woke up, he was already gone.

The doctors told her that he’d woken up and demanded to know where he was, when he was, and after a few questions, they’d figured out just how much he’d forgotten. SHIELD, the Academy, Sci-Ops, the Bus, the past seven years of his life gone in the few minutes he’d spent underwater. And he’d forgotten her too, of course. She wondered precisely when he’d forgotten her but in the end, it didn’t make any difference whether he’d forgotten her first or last or somewhere in the middle of the cascade of memories as they flooded out of his brain. The Leo Fitz that Jemma Simmons had known was gone and she’d known that he was lost to her the minute they wouldn’t let her in to see him in the hospital, even before they told her that with his memory loss, and with his retention of his engineering skills in doubt, they were better off discharging him from SHIELD.

Fitz was gone when they crafted a new life for him, an explanation for his amnesia, seven years’ worth of memories for his family, who’d been left in the dark when he joined SHIELD. He was gone when they bought an apartment in his name and filled it with evidence of the life he’d never had. And most of all, he was gone when they let her say goodbye to him. He could breathe and eat on his own now, all the tubes and wires gone, and as he lay there asleep, she could pretend for a minute that this was normal. So Jemma kicked off her shoes and crawled into bed beside him, like all the other nights of studying for exams and late-night movies and being too tired and too comfortable to go back to their own beds. They still fit together—her head on his chest, their legs and fingers tangled together—and she had to choke back tears when she felt him unconsciously pull her closer. It was a simple biological reaction, him reaching for her heat, she told herself. That was all.

“Hi Fitz.” she whispered. “It’s me, Jemma. I don’t know where they’re sending you, or what life they’ve invented for you, but I wanted to give you something to take with you.” She pulled out the tiny TARDIS that she’d given him years ago and placed it on his bedside table. “So you’ll remember how many people loved you—not just me, the team too—and remember that you loved them back. Maybe you won’t remember the names or the faces or any of the details, but please…Leo, please remember that we loved each other in every way we could. Maybe we didn’t always match up, maybe we missed our chance but you had better remember how much we loved each other.” She drew in a deep, shaky breath and leaned over to press a kiss to his forehead. “Goodbye, Leo Fitz, and good luck.” She didn’t look back as she walked away, maybe because she knew that if she did, she would break. 

She spent the next three years putting herself back together. He spent the next three years starting from scratch. They both spent the next three years trying to forget their nightmares.

Hovering somewhere over the Pacific Ocean on board the Bus, Jemma woke up screaming. It was the same dream as always: Fitz sinking and sinking until he fell out of sight, her screaming his name behind glass. And she did the same thing as always: she crawled out of bed in her baggy argyle pajamas and went to the kitchen to make herself tea while she read through the latest scientific papers. It was a little known fact that Dr. Jemma Simmons had written some of her best paper critiques late at night, trying to chase away unwelcome memories with molecular structures and custom blended Darjeeling. Which had gone missing in a suspicious turn of events.

“I hid all the caffeinated teas.” Skye said, padding into the kitchen. “It’s not good for you. I even gave myself the proper authorization—best friend contract, paragraph ten, line three.”

“I find the fact that you’ve never shown me this contract extremely suspicious.” she accused, laughing, and felt the nightmare get a little farther away. But truthfully she didn’t need to see it. Somewhere along the way, Jemma and Skye had become more like sisters than best friends. Occasionally bickering, often bonding, and always there for each other.

“You should really try to sleep. Coulson scheduled that interview in London for the day after tomorrow. Dr. Jemma Simmons: From Science Baby to Science Badass.” Skye sketched out the headline. Coulson had assigned Jemma to do a part interview about SHIELD’s new scientific training and research programs, part profile of her. He called it part of a “kinder, gentler SHIELD”, Skye and Trip called it a “we’re not evil anymore” piece, and May just told her not to mention the weapons she had stowed in the cockpit. It may have been a joke, but Jemma’d avoided the cockpit ever since.

“I’m not a badass.” she rolled her eyes.

“You’ve saved thousands of people from creepy alien artifacts, you fought HYDRA, you didn’t even freak out when I got superpowers, you have more awards than you know what to do with, you’ve invented so many cool things that no one can keep track of anymore, and you did it all with a broken heart.” Skye realized after she’d said it that there wasn’t a chance of taking it back. They never talked about Fitz anymore. The lab that Jemma had shared with him was lying in pieces somewhere in the Andes, where the Bus had crashed, the team in charge of creating his new life had taken everything of his with them, Skye had never put him back in the system…outside their heads, it was like Leopold Fitz, agent of SHIELD, had never existed at all. And maybe it wasn’t the bravest thing they could have done, but it was the easiest. “Fuck,” Skye blurted out. “Forget that I said it. I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking—Jemma, you know that if you ever wanted me to, I could find him? Just to know that he was all right?”

“You don’t have to do that. To come into his life like that and to expect something knowing that he doesn’t remember me…it would be unfair.” she hugged one of the couch pillows tightly to her chest. Skye had offered before, and she’d always given the exact same answer.

“Whatever you want.” Skye shrugged, trying to seem casual. She had been with Jemma the first time, and the second time, and the third time, and the twenty-fifth time that Jemma had realized she loved Fitz. She’d seen Jemma nearly fall to pieces the day that they took Fitz away and stop herself when she saw everyone watching her. And every time, Skye wanted to pull up Fitz’s location on her laptop, point to the tiny blinking red dot on the screen, and tell Jemma to go find him and fall in love all over again, to get the happy ending that saving the world never seemed to leave time for. She would tell Jemma what she’d thought ever since the first time she’d offered: that Fitz would love Jemma whether or not he remembered her, however he met her, wherever he met her; that some people were simply meant to fit together whoever they became. But she’d never found the courage to actually do it.

“You can go back to sleep. I’ll be fine.”

“I’m not that tired anyway.” Skye lied. “Besides, I found a new trashy TV show for us. It’s about high school students on the Upper East Side who are all paranormal creatures _and_ all sleeping with each other.”

“Are there shirtless men?” It was their tradition: Jemma loudly protested the science in the hospital dramas, Skye rolled her eyes at the powers in the supernatural ones, and they both shamelessly cheered whenever a leading man took his shirt off. At first the rest of the team had made fun of them, but then Trip started wandering into the room and leaning on the couch whenever they were watching, shooting flirty glances at Skye; Coulson had starting coming by to glare at Trip, and even May occasionally stole their popcorn while explaining how she could defeat three of the burly werewolves at once.

“Would I ever let you down like that? Just don’t ask me how many laws I broke to get the stream.” Skye started up the show and that was how they fell asleep, buried under blankets on opposite ends of the couch and with half-empty mugs of tea cooling on the coffee table.

On the other side of the world, Leo Fitz woke up screaming, lying in bed beside his girlfriend Marie. “Babe, what’s the matter?” she asked, leaning over to press a kiss to his shoulder.

“It’s nothing. A bad dream.” He buried his face in the pillows again and waited until Marie had fallen asleep to get up and make a cup of tea. It had been the same dream as always: a girl falling through the sky as he screamed her name behind glass. He could never see her face, or know her name, but he knew one thing with absolute certainty. That he had loved the girl in his dreams, in a desperate, all-consuming way that he had never loved anything else, and that he had lost her.

Two days later, they were both cursing their lack of sleep as they ran through the streets of London. It had started raining the second after Jemma realized she had forgotten her umbrella on the bus and she shivered with cold as she squinted down at her phone, reading a message from Skye: _Change of plans. The reporter you were supposed to meet has the flu. They sent a guy instead—something starting with an L. He’ll be wearing a blue checked shirt and have a press pass around his neck._ She couldn’t help groaning out loud. Of course there was a bloody last minute change in plans, of course she was soaked through from the rain, and of course the café where she was supposed to meet him was packed with people. She scanned the crowd, looking for a blue shirt, and then she froze. Jemma Simmons, owner of multiple PHD’s, genius according to every test imaginable, could only stop and stare, mind frantically calculating the odds, as the reporter came towards her.

“Dr. Simmons?” he said cheerfully, extending his hand. “It’s nice to meet you. I’m Leo Fitz.”


	2. Goodbye Hello

When he met Dr. Jemma Simmons, Leo Fitz’s first (highly unprofessional) thought was that, soaked and grumpy from the rain, she was possibly the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

His second thought was that shit, he wasn’t supposed to think things like that anymore. And his third thought was that she was staring at him like he had two heads and he suddenly couldn’t bear the thought of doing anything to upset her. “Did you get the message that I was coming instead of Emily? She came down with the flu so they sent me at the last minute. I’ve got a credential and everything.” he dug around in his pocket before realizing that it was around his neck, and just barely resisted the urge to beat his head against the wall. He’d only gotten the interview because he got along with Emily better than anyone else, mostly because he didn’t try to hit on her like half of the news department, and now of course, of course he was going to screw it up. But then Dr. Jemma Simmons drew in a deep breath and smiled and, faint as her smile was, he felt a flicker of hope that maybe he still had a chance with her.

“Yes, I did—sorry about that. The jet lag’s muddled my brain. For a minute there I thought you were someone that I used to know.” her voice nearly caught on those last few words. The jet lag again, he thought. “Do you have a table?”

“Near the back. Hopefully it’ll be a bit less noisy.” he gestured to a tiny table tucked into an alcove. “I ordered tea—Darjeeling okay?”

“Sounds perfect.” she said briskly, hanging her coat over the chair. They used to take their tea the exact same way, although she’d sip at it until lunchtime and he’d gulp down at least two cups before he could form a coherent sentence. Two sugars and a splash of cream. And when they reached for the sugar at the same time and only succeeded in knocking it over, she couldn’t help laughing. He laughed too, trying to spoon the sugar back into its tiny silver pot, and some of the anxiety that had been running between them seemed to dissipate.

“So this is obviously my first big interview, and probably yours too…I was thinking that I would just switch my recorder on and we’ll talk. You can ramble as much as you want, I won’t start off with any list of prepared questions, and we’ll see what we get. Sound okay?” he asked and waited for her to nod before he put the recorder on the table between them. “Just start telling me about yourself—your studies, your career, funny stories about SHIELD that aren’t classified…” He kept his voice light and gentle, like any other interview. He’d often be a little awkward in interviews, ordinary and friendly and not at all intimidating, until they forgot he was a reporter. So he pushed down the thought that his awkwardness around Dr. Jemma Simmons might be real. They’d make small talk, he’d ease her into the subject of the interview proper, they’d get to the list of questions, he promised himself. It wouldn’t be obvious to anyone that something about the biochemist made him feel unsettled, like his world had suddenly snapped into new focus. Things looked clearer, sharper, and there seemed to be something new layered over everything: an awareness of every move she made, the way his eyes kept on coming back to her however hard he tried to keep them fixed on his notepad, and how his head tilted towards hers, trying to catch every word. She was talking about the Academy, the “SHIELD Hogwarts” that she’d gone to, and the work she’d done there. About bio-fibers and scent-tracking and some kind of scouting drone and a gun that knocked out people with dendrotoxins instead of killing them. The night-night gun, she called it, rolling her eyes at the name. He thought it was perfect.

“You did a lot of your early work with a partner, right? I’ve read some of your early papers, and they’re credited to Jemma Simmons and partner. Of course, the partner’s simply vanished from the system…how do you think your work’s evolved in the different environments you’ve worked in? By yourself, with a partner, within your SHIELD team?”

“My partner came with me to the team. I practically had to drag him along.” she glanced up from the helixes she was tracing on the table to dimple at him. “His face when he found out our lab flew…”

“He didn’t stay long?”

“He’s gone now. A casualty of the SHIELD civil war.” her eyes flickered down again and her hands tightened on the edge of the table.

“I’m sorry.” He’d seen the SHIELD memorial they’d put up in Washington DC once, etched with the names of everyone who’d been lost to the civil war. Those names had chilled him to the bone, but they’d been heartbreakingly real to her.

“It’s all right. It feels like a long time ago now. And sometimes I even think in a way he’s still here—in his work, of course. The things we invented together.” she added quickly. “But I’m sure you don’t want to hear about it. I’ve got a fascinating story about how we reclaimed our plane from HYDRA and promptly crashed it in the Andes if you’d like that?”

“I’ll hear anything that you want to tell me.” Leo and Jemma sat there for hours, after he’d filled up the pages of his notebook, after the batteries in his recorder had died with a faint beep, and long after their food had gone cold. He could see the story taking shape in each word. The fast sentences, tumbling over each other as she talked about their efforts to recruit more girls into science. The slow ones, as she sipped at her tea and tried to summon memories of what she’d done for her first PhD.. And everything in between: the long scientific tangents that he was surprised he was able to follow along with, grateful for the unused engineering degree he’d once acquired at MIT, the funny stories about her team that she made him promise to keep off the record, and the questions that flowed back and forth between them like water.

It would be a story about a new kind of SHIELD for a new kind of world. An agency that gave and took in equal measure, that used its labs to develop new medicines as well as new weapons, that learned to do the best with what it had. It would be a story about a new kind of agent for this new SHIELD. And, best of all, it would be a story about the extraordinary Dr. Jemma Simmons, the woman who meant so much more than…he couldn’t remember what. Lately, he’d had so many moments like this: on the verge of something important and stuck with half the words, half the picture, half the memory. The sound of a girl’s laugh, but not her voice; the glint of light off a tool but not what it truly was; the feeling of being in love but not even the feel of a kiss to hold on to. He grumbled in frustration, not realizing that he’d done it out loud until she apologized for her terrible memory. “I’m very good at remembering textbooks and experimental data and facts, but I’m awful at remembering what happened when. I’m awfully sorry. I can send you a timeline later?” she offered.

“No, no, it’s not that at all. I was trying to remember the tag line I’m going to use for the article…if anyone’s got a terrible memory, it’s me. You’re actually talking to an amnesiac.” He hadn’t meant to tell her about the accident until he did, and by then the way that her eyes widened with interest made him want to go on. “I had a scuba diving accident three years ago. I was without oxygen for a few minutes and when I woke up, seven years were gone.” Leo had gotten used to telling the story by now, to boiling it down to the simple facts. Two minutes equaled seven years and they would come back, if they ever did, when they felt like it.

“Have you remembered anything from those years?” she leaned across the table.

“Flashes, now and then. Mostly of places, never of people. I think I was a bit of a vagabond—my parents have this whole series of cryptic postcards from me all around the world—and I don’t think I ever stayed anywhere long, since I can’t find anyone who knew me when I was traveling. Probably a bit of a tosser, too, now that I think about it.” he added absently. “Maybe I needed that accident to knock some sense into me, make me settle down.”

“You’re married?” her voice cracked on the question and he felt a flash of guilt for keeping her in the cafe for hours. She must have been exhausted from her flight.  


“Just a girlfriend. Marie. It’s been almost two years now, which is closer to settled down than I think I’ve ever been.” He was fairly sure that he’d been a terrible boyfriend to the women he’d dated, easily distracted, constantly traveling, and always waiting for the girl he barely remembered.

“I don’t think you were quite as bad as you imagine you were.” she said carefully as her eyes drifted down to her tea again. “Do you have any more questions for me?” And of course he did. An hour later, her phone rang and she remembered the team dinner Coulson had scheduled at the hotel. She was halfway to the door when he called after her.

“I was wondering if I could have your email? If there’s any further questions?” he asked and snatched the business card that she tossed him out of the air.  


“Of course. It was very nice meeting you, Leo Fitz.”

“You too, Jemma Simmons. You too.” His eyes lingered too long on her perfect posture as he watched her go.

That perfect posture was the only thing that kept her from crying until she was outside


	3. Letters Part 1

When Leo finally got home, Marie was on her way to work, draping a scarf around her neck in typically French fashion and smoothing down her sleek black bob in the mirror. “Good interview?” she asked and went up on the tips of her toes to kiss him.

“Very good interview. She was incredibly brilliant—I think I’ve got some really great quotes.” he slid an arm around her waist to pull her in for another kiss and give her his best puppy dog eyes. “Are you going to bring food home for me again?” Marie was a pastry chef at an exclusive London restaurant, the kind where desserts came gilded with gold leaf and getting a reservation required friends in high places.

“There’s a plate in the oven for you. Besides, it’s lavender crème brulee tonight. You’d hate it.” Marie paused, turned in the door. “I didn’t know your subject was a woman.”

“Dr. Jemma Simmons, yes. I don’t see why that makes any difference.” he tried his best not to sigh. They’d both been the jealous type when they first met, sulking when the other was paying attention to a pretty someone else or having too-loud arguments in pubs about who looked at who, and they’d tried their best to lose the habit, but sometimes that edge still came into her voice and he had to work hard to keep himself from snapping back at her. “Reporters only run off with their subjects in movies, Marie.” he said gently. “I’m here and I’m not going anywhere.” And after he’d spent half an hour reassuring Marie and she’d called a cab so she wouldn’t be late to work, he sat down and tried to list all the reasons that he loved her.

Marie had a wonderful laugh, easy and carefree, and never cared if people stared at her when they heard it. She adored their dog, a fat corgi called Tesla, and talked to him in a range of silly voices. She was sophisticated and exciting and sometimes wonderfully spontaneous, like the time they stayed out until three in the morning at a party in an abandoned Tube station, and very French. She was passionate, grabbing him and kissing him the moment he came home; she was dedicated to her job, working her way to the top after years of flourless chocolate cakes and apple cobblers; she cooked the best food he’d ever tasted, she never asked him questions about his lost years…it was a good life.

But when Leo Fitz wasn’t concentrating properly, he kept on remembering waves of brown hair and slender hands stirring her tea, how it had been easier to talk to her than anyone else he had ever met. And he liked talking to people—he’d done plenty of interviews, he told himself. Only this one hadn’t felt like an interview. It’d felt like two minds on the verge of becoming one, like something he’d been waiting for as long as he could remember. So as hard as he tried to remember that she was his interview subject, and he was involved and she would be running off to save the world, he remembered that feeling better and he opened his laptop and started composing a new email.

_Dear_ ~~Jemma~~ Dr. Simmons  
I was wondering if you could tell me more about the research center…

When Jemma finally got back to the hotel room, Skye took one look at her and knew. “Oh my god. Oh my fucking god.” Skye leapt up from the couch where she’d been cuddling against Trip, eyes wide.

“You promised not to do that anymore.” she said weakly. The first of Skye’s powers to emerge had been her ability to read their minds. It had made for a few incredibly awkward weeks before May taught her exercises to control it and taught the rest of them to keep their thoughts to ourselves.

“I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry. It’s just…” Skye took a deep breath. “Your mind was screaming his name.” Everyone went silent. With Jemma, there was always one him.

“You saw him?” Coulson asked slowly.

“He was the reporter that the paper sent…and I…I couldn’t leave.” she gripped the door frame and tried to choke back the tears that threatened again. She’d walked through the streets of London for hours after the interview, letting the rain blend with her tears, until she could blame her red-rimmed eyes and hoarse voice on the cold and the exhaustion. Three years ago, Jemma had thought she had no tears left after they took him away, and she’d thought that three months after he was gone, and she’d thought that just three minutes ago. And she was wrong every time. “Excuse me, please.” she blurted out and fled into one of the bedrooms.

Jemma curled up under the blankets and buried her face in the pillow, letting out a silent scream. Now that the shock and the tears and the heart-stopping relief that he was okay had started to fade, she discovered that she was angry. Possibly angrier than she’d ever been in her life. He was smiling and cheerful and carefree. He had a probably perfect girlfriend, he was “close to settling down”, he had a prestigious career. His shoulders were broader and his smiles were more frequent—if you asked Leo Fitz how he was doing, he’d say great, she thought. And, worst of all, he was great without her. She’d spent the last three years remembering precisely what she’d lost, trying to piece her broken heart back into something that worked, throwing herself into her work and ignoring how strange it felt without her partner, learning each and every new way that she could miss him. She still couldn’t sleep through the night, she’d never managed to gain back the weight she’d lost in the months after, she’d had three relationship fall apart because of the simple fact that she was still in love with him, and she’d pushed through everything missing a piece of herself. And it was a piece that he didn’t even know he had.

She screamed into the pillow again and Skye poked her head around the door. “Jemma, can I come in?” she whispered. Jemma nodded and Skye came to perch on the edge of the bed, tentatively reaching out a hand to Jemma. “Are you okay?”

“No. I’m not. He’s okay. He’s fabulous.” she said bitterly. “You know, I thought—I stupidly, stupidly thought—that he’d see me and he’d remember something. I thought that he couldn’t let go of us that easily.” Jemma buried her head in the pillow again, only to yelp in protest when Skye yanked the pillow away from her.

“Maybe he doesn’t remember you, but he definitely likes you.” Skye said firmly.

“He has a girlfriend.”

“I didn’t necessarily mean in that way.” Though of course she had. “ You guys can still be friends. Jemma, how long was your interview supposed to be?”

“An hour, maybe an hour and a half.” Jemma sniffed.

“You came back three hours later than you were supposed to. No one spends four and a half hours talking to someone they don’t like, especially when they have a deadline to make. Besides,” Skye held up Jemma’s phone. “You had three emails from him in the last hour.” Jemma instantly grabbed for it, scrolling through her email, and frowned at the messages in confusion. They were follow-up questions to the interview, ones she was pretty sure she’d answered already. “He’s looking for an excuse to talk to you.” Skye sounded particularly smug.

“So what am I supposed to do?” she asked helplessly.

“Answer him. I’ll be back with cookies in a minute, okay? Want wine too?” Jemma didn’t even look up from her email to answer Skye. “I’ll take that as a yes.” The door swung shut behind her and Jemma let out a long sigh as she started typing. It wasn’t close to what she wanted from him, not by a long ways, but even if it never went any farther than friendship, it was something, a chance to find her way back to what she’d lost.

__~~Dear Leo Dear Fitz~~ Dear Mr. Fitz  
I’m so glad to hear from you again…


	4. Letters Part 2

January 24  
Dear Dr. Simmons  
You reply to email more quickly than anyone I know—that’s probably what happens when you’re a certified genius. The profile will run on Sunday after the fact checkers are through with it. I can send you a copy if you’d like? (I promise there aren’t any silly pictures of you holding test tubes in it.) I’m almost definitely not supposed to say this, but I hope you like it. Or at least think it’s interesting.  
Best, Leo Fitz  
P.S. Ignore the first line. I just realized how silly it sounded.  
P.P.S. You can call me Leo.  


January 27  
Dear Leo,  
I liked the profile very much, although two of my teammates are scowling because you put in the story about the time they got lost in Paris because they’d told the GPS they were in Paris, Texas. My boss is smiling smugly because, according to him, it makes us seem more approachable and “less evil”. (Apparently the bad guys have a better sense of direction.) Either way, they think we need a new engineer. I think it would be impractical, especially with the samples I’ve got in the lab. The last engineer I knew got awfully upset over a simple cat liver.  
I just remembered that I forgot to thank you for leaving my partner out of the story. I really do appreciate that.  
Best,  
Jemma Simmons  
P.S. Sorry for the rambling email. I’m somewhere top-secret and the jet lag is horrific.  
P.P.S. You can call me Jemma.

January 28  
Dear Jemma,  
Any self-respecting engineer would object to a cat liver in his lab. I’ve actually got an engineering degree from MIT, so I think that gives me authority to make a stand against cat livers everywhere…

At first the emails were a little awkward as they wandered from topic to topic and their sentences snagged on each other like loose threads and at first they were short, observations that he dashed off on his lunch break or scientific articles that she emailed him in the middle of the night, like they’d both imposed their own word limits. Then he sent her a two thousand word email on the challenges of trying to go on vacation and simultaneously report on a scientific conference at the same time, framed as a tangential, footnoted attempt at a lab report, and her reply was twice as long. After that, they sent each other long rambling messages that swerved from science to Harry Potter to the proper ratio of pesto aioli to bread in his favorite sandwich. Leo found himself listening for the chime that signaled a new message or absently refreshing his email when he had nothing to do, like he could summon a new message from her with the sheer force of how much he wanted one.

Jemma sent him pictures of the plunger of the stuffed Dalek by her bunk on the Bus, the green felt of the pool table at the rebuilt Academy, a close-up of the virus she’d been analyzing, the cuff of her sweater and dared him to guess what they were. Leo got all the answers right but he also got them wrong. Fitz had given her the Dalek as a Christmas present the year that they met and only pretended to be grumpy about the sound effects, he’d helped her win fifty dollars off their classmates at pool on that table and, tipsy from the shots they’d been taking, had kissed her in celebration; he’d let her steal the sweater from his closet without even raising an eyebrow, and he’d worked with her to find a cure to that Chitauri virus. But Leo didn’t know any of that.

She had to stop after a while, before she forgot that he wasn’t hers anymore. Instead she sent him photographs of clues to where she was, telling him if he was right once they made the operation public, and although he missed the glimpses into her life, he didn’t say anything. The new Leo Fitz and the new Jemma Simmons were navigating their way into their new friendship, learning how far the boundaries stretched. She didn’t like talking about the years before the SHIELD Civil War, he didn’t like talking about the month after he’d woken up and found that there was no one waiting for him. And maybe they still had years to catch up on, but something about the navigation itself felt so utterly familiar: the way that he slipped in bits of his history in the middle of long streams of scientific discussions, half-hoping she wouldn’t notice them and half-hoping she would; how she could never resist the random useful facts that popped up in parentheses throughout her emails. She marveled at both the things that made him Leo instead of Fitz, like the day when he mentioned his hiking trip in the Swiss Alps, and at the things that reminded her of Fitz, like his endless enthusiasm for the walk-through monkey habitat at the London Zoo. Talking to him was old and new and exciting and terrifying all at once, and she knew it was dangerous and she didn’t care.

June 1  
Jemma—  
Panels I have attended at this conference in New York: 12.  
Number of times I have fallen asleep during said panels: 5  
Unexpected assignments received from editor: 2  
Number of days I am staying in New York afterwards to do them: 4  
Restaurant openings that I will have to work very hard not to miss: 1  
Angry girlfriends: 1, although it feels like 10.  
Jemma, if I wind up murdered with a fine set of cooking knives and a blowtorch, you’ll know who did it.  
—Leo

June 1  
Leo—  
I’m working on a calming serum for performing surgeries in the field—I’d offer it to you only right now it has the unfortunate side effect of knocking people out for days. Really you’ll just have to hope that there aren’t any flight delays. Maybe I’ll even try to talk my boss into giving you a ride…  
If you’re in New York, would you like to meet up for lunch or something? We had a meeting here and I’ve got a day or two before we leave again.  
—Jemma

Leo had thought that he would be early but she was even earlier. She’d texted him that she was by Chelsea Market while he was still on the A train and he glared at anyone in his way as he sprinted down the block to meet her. Then he saw her, wearing a sky-blue dress and her hair up in a French twist, and waved frantically from across the street. She turned, saw him, smiled, one of those impossible smiles that could power a city all on their own, and the bottom dropped out of his heart. That day they ate huge amounts of food at Chelsea Market and wandered the High Line and got lost in the stacks at the Strand and examined dinosaur bones at the Museum of Natural History and stayed out until it was dark everywhere but Times Square. They finished each other’s sentences and made terrible science puns and it was as easy as if they’d been seeing each other every day since that rainy January afternoon. And all the time the three simple facts that he’d realized kept on pounding through his head. One, he was in love with her. Two, according to every rational thought he’d ever had, he shouldn’t be in love with her. Three, his rational thoughts didn’t stand a chance.


	5. Things Left Behind

The next time he saw her, she was chasing down a monster and he was supposed to be on vacation. He thought that he'd managed to convince himself that he wasn't in love with her and he was wrong. Unable to sleep on the plane back to the UK, he'd persuaded himself that she didn't feel the same, that she couldn't possibly. He'd remembered obligations and commitments and the fact that she never spent more than a few days in the same place. Then he saw her again and he realized that he just didn't care.

She was scribbling down calculations on a notepad and pushing buttons on a remote control, and frantically measuring out substances on the breakfast table. She was wearing a lab coat and a high ponytail and scowling at something and from the way her hand kept tapping on the table, faster and faster, he could tell that she was on the verge of panic. She couldn't have been father from the carefree, laughing Jemma that he'd seen in New York and in his eyes she was still impossibly beautiful.

Jemma tipped right over the edge into panic when she saw him standing there. They'd evacuated all the guests at the bed-and-breakfast after it had been designated a no-civilian zone, at least until they managed to disable the creature that the mad scientist had left behind him—a massive dog with three heads that vaguely reminded her of Fluffy. Trip and May had set up roadblocks, Coulson had alerted the local authorities, and he was somehow standing there in the kitchen. “Leo?” she asked. “What are you doing here?”

“Marie and I were up north for a wedding and we thought we'd hike along Hadrian's Wall for a bit afterward, make it a proper vacation.” Try to find what they used to have, the easy comfort that slipped away a little more with every wedding they went to. “I came in through the back way to check in but I don't see any sign of a--”

“The bed-and-breakfast's been shut down for now. There were odd phenomena in the area for years and now that we finally had time to investigate, we found a....lair.” Jemma winced at the word. “It looks like there was a rogue scientist here for years—another SHIELD team captured him a few months ago—but he left a few things behind and we're just cleaning up. So you should probably go.” There was a loud crash, followed by a series of even louder barks and a sharp shot, and she grabbed his wrist and pulled him under the table. “Is Marie outside?” she whispered. He nodded yes and she hissed a series of instructions to him, telling him to run out and get Marie, then find a room and stay inside it until they were given the all-clear by one of her team. She was working on a calming serum for the creature they were chasing and they would be able to go as soon as she got the dispersal system right, she promised and shoved him out the door.

But after he'd pulled Marie through the door and into an empty guest room, he came back into the kitchen and crawled under the table with her, where she'd transferred her materials to keep them safe. “Let me see,” he said firmly.

“You're not supposed to be in here.”

“You need an engineer and I happen to be here. I remember quite a lot from my classes at MIT.” He'd thought that he didn't remember much but now equations and experiments and bits of scientific jargon were flooding into his head, some of them far more advanced than anything he would have learned as an undergraduate, and yet he didn't question it. And even though he knew (didn't he?) that they'd never done this before, it felt as simple as breathing, standing beside Jemma ready to work with her. “So if I can help at all, we're going to fix this. Together.” So they did, trading tools and ideas back and forth underneath the table, her coating darts with various blends as he fiddled with the fletching, and handing each other various items before either one said that they needed it.

“Jemma, please tell me that you have the darts ready.” A pretty Asian girl wielding a terrifying assortment of knives burst into the room and stopped in her tracks when she saw them under the table. She was looking at Leo oddly and he waved at her, trying his best to look nonthreatening.

“We just finished them.” Jemma crawled out from underneath the table and carefully handed the protective case they'd slotted the darts into to the girl. “Is everyone in position?”

“Yes.” The other girl kept on darting glances at Leo out of the corner of her eyes, even as she backed out of the room, and the unsettling thought occurred to him that he might have met her before. Worse, he might have screwed her over. Worst of all, he might have literally screwed her over. It was only after she left that he realized she hadn't been carrying the case of darts: she'd been levitating it.

“That's my best friend Skye. She's the team hacker and telepath. Telekinetic, too.” Jemma said it so casually, like she'd had people reading her mind for years. After all, she'd let Skye practice on her during those first chaotic months, after Skye had walked into her lab and announced that either she was going crazy or she was hearing people's thoughts. Then she saw the worry on Leo's face and she remembered the lists of their fears they'd sent each other once. His first one had been meeting someone that he didn't remember, someone that he'd hurt in the past and would never be able to apologize to. “You just look like someone she used to know—don't worry.” she added quickly.

There was another loud crash and a message crackled through Jemma's com, a long string of words and numbers. “The darts must have worked.” she said, trying to summon a cheerfulness she didn't feel. “That's the all clear. You can go and get Marie now.” She made some kind of ridiculous shooing motion and gave him her brightest smile, even though all she wanted to do was tell him to stay. For a little while she'd been able to pretend that they were Fitzsimmons again, that he'd woken up and remembered her name, that after this he would be coming back to the Bus with her. But he was going home with someone else and she was letting him go again and she'd become so very, very good at it.

“Email soon?” he asked awkwardly, hovering in the doorway. She nodded and he left her again. It was May who found her, still sitting underneath the table, and handed her a thermos of steaming hot tea, crawling under the table to give it to her.

“You know, he's sitting under a table too upstairs. Looking fairly unhappy without you.” May said gently.

“He and Marie haven't left yet?” He should have been long gone, she thought, riding off into the sunset.

“She wouldn't let him in, there was yelling, and...He looked like he needed someone to talk to. Go talk to him.” When Melinda May gave an order, everyone listened. So Jemma went upstairs to find Leo scowling underneath the dining room table with his knees drawn up to his chest and his hair sticking straight up. He'd been running his hands through it again, like he always did when he was frustrated. 

“Hey.” she whispered and knelt to crawl under the table with him. “I thought you'd be gone by now.”

“We were supposed to be. But...” he turned to her. “Can we go outside and talk? Just to be somewhere where the fight isn't still hovering around our heads?” He could still feel it in the air, thick with all the accusations that he and Marie thrown back and forth, thick enough to choke on. She nodded and they went out into the garden, perching on a high stone wall where he could stare at the green fields and puzzle out his words. “We've been going to a lot of weddings lately, even some baby showers.” Leo started. “And every time someone asks us if we're going to be next, and every time I can feel how much she wants me to say yes, and every time I don't say anything. Because she's wonderful and I care about her but she's not it. She's not the one. Like when I close my eyes and imagine my wedding, I don't see her walking down the aisle towards me. So of course she caught the bouquet at this wedding and—I just don't—I can't--”

“How do you tell someone that? That there's nothing wrong with them except for the fact that they're not right?” she said sadly. “I know. I was dating a guy a year or two ago, actually. And he was wonderful: he was smart, he was kind, he was handsome, and he loved me. But I was in love with someone else and even though I'd lost him years ago, no one else could ever compare.” Her ex had told her that she was in love with a ghost, just before he left for the last time, and she hadn't even been able to deny it.

“I don't suppose you ever found him again?” It hit him a second too late: she'd been in love with her partner, the one who she'd lost to the SHIELD Civil War, and he was an idiot.

“I found pieces of him, and I guess that those will have to be enough.” If she looked at him, she would break, she knew it. So she stared down at the wall, only to feel his fingers lace through hers and stay there.

“I'm sorry.” he squeezed her hand tight. “Jemma, can I tell you a story? I don't know if it'll make you feel better, but maybe it'll make you feel like someone understands.” He waited for her nod, then went on. “I told you that I get flashes of those years, the ones that I lost, and most of the time they're just snapshots, images that don't make much sense. But one thing is crystal clear: there was a girl and she was perfect and I was in love with her. Really, truly, madly, deeply, get down on one knee and propose in love. I don't remember her face or her voice or the way that she kissed me, or even if she did kiss me. But I remember that I loved her better than anything else in the world, and that I lost her.”

“Maybe it was the other way around. Maybe she lost you.” Jemma choked out. She was absolutely sure that she was going to cry and absolutely sure that she couldn't. If she cried, he would ask questions and if he asked questions, she would tell him and if she told him, he would hate her for keeping it from him and, most of all, for letting herself lose him. And she couldn't bear the thought of him hating her. That was when she realized she wasn't in love with a ghost anymore. She was in love with who Leo had become and it felt infinitely better and worse than loving who he had been.

“I don't think she's ever going to find me—I have dreams where she's falling through the sky and I can't do anything to stop it.” he shivered, even in the warm summer air. “But I think that maybe now I've learning my way into letting her go.” The words were on the tip of his tongue: I only let her go when I found you. But he didn't say them and after they sat for a while in silence, he got up and headed inside to find Marie, to coax her out of the room and into the car and to their flat, and to find the words to unravel the last few stitches of their relationship.

Skye came out looking for Jemma when the sun was setting and found her still sitting on the stone wall, crying like her heart had been broken one time too many. “He remembers me,” Jemma said quietly. “He remembers me and he's letting me go.”

“He's letting the girl in the past go. Do you want to know what I saw when I read his mind?” Skye asked. Jemma shook her head and Skye sighed. Standing in the kitchen in that brief moment, she'd seen Leo Fitz's thoughts. And every last one of them had been full of Jemma.

They were driving back in the car when Marie finally spoke to him. “I'll move out when we get back. Your name is on the lease anyway.” He didn't protest, didn't try to change her mind, just kept his eyes on the road as he talked. 

“It really wasn't you, I promise. I know that everyone says that, but I--” 

“I saw the way that you looked at her. The scientist. Like you couldn't imagine anyone more perfect.” They didn't talk on the way back to the flat. And two days later, after Marie had moved the last of her boxes out, Leo Fitz stood in his flat and thought that it didn't feel empty. It felt like the first page of a new chapter, an endless array of possibilities where each sentence started with Jemma.


	6. After Midnight

Jemma wasn't a fan of the noisy club Skye had dragged her out to, or the tight black and white lace dress Skye had zipped her into, or the third wheel that Skye had made her into, as Skye and Trip kissed in a corner. However, she was a fan of the very elaborate fruity cocktails that the bartender could make and she decided then and there that she was going to get tremendously drunk, until she couldn't even discuss basic chemistry. Which would require at least eight more drinks.

“Skye,” she shouted. No response. So she marched over to the corner, trying not to wobble on the lipstick red heels Skye had lent her, and tapped Skye on the shoulder. Firmly. “Skye. There's at least six cocktails on the menu that I haven't tried and I need the credit card. In the name of scientific experimentation.”

“You're not going to get drunk, Jemma. You never get drunk. It's kind of scary.” Skye disentangled herself from Trip and fished around in her purse for the card, her movements already loose and sloppy although Jemma couldn't tell if it was from the drinks or from the giddiness of being kissed and kissing back. “As your best friend, I advise you to go dance, preferably with a cute boy. That is what I'm going to do and, as your best friend, I would feel terrible if I deserted you.”

“So you're official now?” Jemma glanced down at Skye's hand, still tangled with Trip's, and couldn't help smiling. She'd seen it coming long before everyone else, the first time when Trip and Skye had come back from a mission together and Skye had insisted on patching up his injuries herself, the first time that Trip had accidentally on purpose picked the seat next to Skye, long before Trip had started laughing at Skye's terrible puns and the rest of the team started giving them weird looks. When Skye had solemnly asked for her blessing, Jemma had given it instantly and reminded her that they called the one date she'd gone on with Trip, a few months after they'd taken Fitz away, was called the Date of Doom for a reason. Then she'd moved on to teasing Skye about him every chance she got.

“We're so official that I'm making us trading cards. Antoine Triplett and Skye, Couple Extraordinare.” Trip interjected, tugging Skye back towards him and kissing her. They really were nauseatingly adorable, Jemma thought as she headed back to the bar and calculated the (extremely good) odds that she would be sleeping on a couch tonight. She was halfway through her third cocktail when her phone buzzed with a text from Skye: JEMMA, LOOK UP NOW. So she looked up at the balcony and there he was, waiting to be found.

Leo had let his friends drag him out because they believed that any and all breakups should be followed by large amounts of alcohol and when he'd protested that he had a perfectly good bottle of Scotch at home, they'd told him he needed to find a pretty girl to drink it with. Of course, he hadn't been able to tell them that the only pretty girl he wanted was likely halfway across the world. “Come on, Leo.” his friend Jamie forcibly turned him around to look down at the dance floor. “I see a blonde who looks like a good dancer, a brunette who looks like she has good taste, and a redhead who just looks good.” 

“Show me the brunette?” he sighed heavily. Then Jamie pointed down at the bar, right at Jemma. “Her. I pick her.” he blurted out and sprinted down the stairs, weaving through the crowd and not caring who he elbowed on his way to Jemma until he finally skidded to a stop in front of her. “Hi,” he said breathlessly.

“Hi.” she smiled up at him, impossibly wide and bright, and felt a blush begin to creep up her cheeks. “I was going to call you once I knew we were staying on in London—there was this consulting detective who someone reported as a psychic and of course he wasn't, Skye took one look at him and knew but then Coulson decided we needed to try to recruit him despite the fact that any of us could have told him it was a doomed idea. Anyway, we're here until Monday and I thought about calling you but I thought you'd be busy and Skye dragged me out tonight—and now you're here. Hi.” 

“I got dragged out too. My friends decided I needed cheering up after Marie and I broke up, even though I told them that I was fine about...” he shut his eyes, calculating. “Fifty-seven times.” 

“I'm sorry to hear it.” She tried not to be happy about the news and failed miserably.

“It was a long time coming.” he tried to make his next question sound casual and failed miserably. “I was wondering if maybe I could buy you a drink?”

“I'd like that very much.” Really, she'd love it. She'd love a drink and dinner and a date and a night and the next day and the one after it and everything he could give her. They fell back into easy conversation after a while, analyzing the various components of Jemma's drink and getting into a spirited argument about the merits of the Ninth versus the Tenth Doctor, but a new awareness still ran between them, an electric crackle in the air Maybe it was the dress she was wearing, cream and black lace that dipped low in the front and the back, or the shirt that brought out the blue in his eyes, or the way that their eyes settled on each other and didn't leave. The bass thudded under their bar stools and people swarmed around them, shouting out drink orders, and they were so completely wrapped up in each other that they both jumped when her phone buzzed again. She took one look at it and groaned.

“What's happened?”

“Skye's kicking me out tonight.” she pointed to Skye, who was leading Trip out of the club with a determined look. “I'm sharing a hotel room with her and she just made it official with her boyfriend...and the thought of trying to share with May is just terrifying. Which means that I end up in the hotel lobby, curled up in an armchair, until five am. Again.” She didn't mention that Skye only did this when she wanted Jemma to go home with someone.

“You can come stay with me.” he offered, then once he'd realized what he was saying. “ In a friendly, honorable intentions way, I mean.” Now they were both blushing. “I've got a futon you can sleep on and there's an Indian takeaway place near my flat that's quite good.” 

“I'd...I'd also like that very much.” Jemma drained the rest of her drink decisively and slipped her hand into his. Maybe she was drunk for the first time in her life, she thought, because she kept her hand in his the whole way back to his flat as a warm fizzy feeling that was better than anything she'd ever gotten from drinking champagne crept up her arm. They kept on holding hands on the Tube, where she let herself lean against his shoulder, and at the Indian place, where he didn't even complain about holding the bags with one hand, and up the sixty-six steps to his flat, where he finally had to let go to undo the seven locks on his tiny door. It swung open to reveal a sprawling flat and she gasped in delight. “It's bigger on the inside.”

There were skylights set into the roof of his living room, so it was flooded in light in the mornings. His bookshelves were crammed, cheap paperback science fiction novels and glossy hardcover science books that he'd reviewed for the paper and thick fantasy epics stacked on top of each other and on the verge of toppling down. His coffee table was hidden under a stack of more books and DVDs, his couch had several sweaters draped across it, and a very battered cookbook was splayed face down across his kitchen counter, bristling with colored sticky notes. He was trying to teach himself to cook and failing, he explained, and flipped open the cookbook to let her see his irritated pencil notes in the margins. It was all so very Fitz and she couldn't help giggling, even after he shot her a mock-offended look. He'd always written in his books, underlining and commenting until his notes covered the paragraphs of text, and when other people asked him how he was able to read them, he'd used his best genius voice and said that he memorized them. Obviously.

He made setting out the Indian food into a huge production, lining up all the containers in a row down his worn wooden kitchen table and pulling down his best heavy blue ceramic plates to eat off of. They ended up eating on the floor after they'd covered the table with all the little condiments and containers of rice and foil-wrapped packets of naan and covered the floor with the pillows and blankets from his couch. It was past midnight, late enough for everything to seem like a dream as she stole food off his plate and they wrestled for control of his remote as he scrolled through the channels looking for reruns of Doctor Who so they could continue their Nine vs. Ten debate. After fifteen minutes of hobbits walking, ten of Captain Kirk barking out commands, and five of some terrible old sci-fi movie with rubber aliens, they finally gave up and Leo slowly stood up, yawning enormously. “The spare room's that way.” he said, waving in what he was pretty sure was the right direction. “Do you need anything to sleep in?”

“Yes, please.” she tugged at her dress and sighed. It had somehow managed to ride up and slide down and if it wasn't for the way his eyes kept on slipping back to her, she would have been silently cursing Skye for making her wear it.

“Okay, I'll be right back.” When he came back, Jemma was scowling at the half-undone zipper on her dress and he nearly dropped the stack of t-shirts he was holding.

“It's stuck. Can you help me get it?” she asked softly and guided his hand to her side, shivering as his warm fingers brushed against her skin. He pulled it down slowly, the edge of his hand slipping inside her dress, and she leaned back into him. And it wasn't because of the cocktails still lingering in her system or the haze of late night decisions or the warm imprint his fingers had been leaving on her skin all evening, although they may have been the things that brought her there. It was simple as this. Jemma Simmons was tired of waiting and tired of being good and absolutely certain that she'd never wanted anything as badly in her life as she wanted him to kiss her at that moment. So she gathered up her courage, turned to face him, and let her dress drop to the floor, loving the way his eyes went wide and his hands followed the path of the fabric down to grip her hips. “Leo Fitz, if you don't kiss me right now, I think I might go mad.” she whispered.

So he did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you can see from this chapter, I do subscribe to the common headcanon that Fitzsimmons have an incredibly high alcohol tolerance.
> 
> Points to anyone who finds the Sherlock reference!


	7. Morning After

7\. 2:00AM “I think I've always known how to kiss you.” he told her afterward, when they were wrapped up in each other underneath his plaid sheets. “That some part of me knew how to kiss someone when it really mattered and was just waiting for you to come along.”

“I took a long time, didn't I?” she said idly, paying more attention to the soft skin where his neck met his jaw and the way he shuddered when she pressed her lips there. She hadn't stopped touching him all night, memorizing everything she hadn't seen before and everything she had, from the thin scars on his hands from where their Academy term project had gone wrong to his hopelessly tangled curls to the muscle he'd acquired over the past three years. From the rock climbing, he told her, and even though she still wondered how on earth Leo had ever gotten into rock climbing, she'd never appreciated the sport more. “I wish I'd shown up sooner.” _I wish I'd been there when you woke up._  
“Maybe I wasn't ready for you before. We just had to catch up to each other, be in the right place at the right time.” She'd been sprawled on top of him already and it only took a tug to pull her properly on top of him, her eyes laughing down at him. “So, now that we're in the right place at the right time, what do you want to do?”

“I think you should kiss me again.” And he did.

4:00AM. “I knew in New York, when I saw you smile at me.” He propped himself up above her and swooped down to kiss her stomach, loving the way that it made her giggle. “What were you doing in New York anyway?”

“I was at Avengers Tower. Top secret. Though if you're good, maybe I'll give you some Avengers gossip.” It was getting harder to breathe normally as he worked his way down, mapping out the curve of her waist and the soft skin of her inner thighs.

“I'm very, very good.” Three hours ago, he'd been pretty sure that the best part of this night was the feeling of her mouth slanted against his. Two hours ago, he'd been sure that it was the feeling of her curled against his side. But now he was absolutely sure that it was this: her shivers and sighs, her hands coiled tightly in his hair, her eyes fluttering shut when everything was just too much, and his desperate need to remember exactly how beautiful she looked in that moment, to memorize every last inch of her.

“I bet I'm better.” she gasped afterward and pulled him back up to kiss him. “Do you still want your gossip?”

“Yes please.” He gave her puppy-dog eyes, a little boy asking to unwrap his presents on Christmas morning.

“So Tony Stark told me that I was free to look in on one of his labs—Stark Industries is still trying to recruit me.” she added proudly. “And I was looking for one that wasn't being used that I could poke around in and instead I found Captain America and Agent Romanoff making out.”

“No...”

“Yes...when I told Coulson I thought that he was going to faint.”

9:00AM Leo reached for her when he woke up, only to find still-warm sheets instead, and stumbled into the kitchen to see Jemma dressed in his shirt and staring into his fridge. “Your eggs are still good.” she said, sounding faintly surprised.

“Told you I was trying to learn how to cook.” he slid his arms around her waist and started sleepily kissing her neck. “It's too early to be up, Jemma.” 

“It's already nine o'clock.” She's always been a morning person: up, showered, dressed, and brewing a cup of tea before Fitz even managed to struggle out from beneath his covers. She had meant to sort out her dress and his tie and the pile of clothing that was lying on his living room floor and finally be souffle girl and make him some sort of complicated souffle thing and probably make tea too, but his hands working at the buttons of her (really his) shirt and his lips on her pulse made her melt backwards into him and want to sigh with happiness at the sheer fact that he was there and he was hers.  
“Jemma.” He drew out her name until he could taste every letter, like a prayer that he was hoping would last for just a minute longer. “We've got hours. Come back to bed.” And with that, he scooped her up, letting her loop her arms around his neck, and carried her back to the bed.

11:30AM She was making them both omelets, with everything she could find in his fridge thrown in, after their first souffle attempt had collapsed in a spectacular manner. He was watching her, fetching things down whenever she asked for them and wondering whether she was going to steal that shirt permanently and realizing he wouldn't mind if she did. He presented her with the fancy spices he'd gone through half his cabinets to find and told her that she was a true hero to make anything complicated in his kitchen. She dimpled at him and said lightly “You found me all the ingredients, Fitz. You're the hero.”

And then he wasn't standing in his kitchen anymore. He was trapped behind glass again, screaming the name of the girl he loved as she fell through the sky. The glass of his lab, he realized. He'd had a lab. One on a plane. And he'd shared it with her. The girl trying to save everyone else and never trying to save herself, the girl he'd been madly in love with, the girl who'd been a mystery ever since he woke up and realized she wasn't there. Only now she had a name and a face. And it was Jemma's.


	8. Things Fall Apart

“You've been here all along.” he said, voice shaking. “You've been beside me--”

“Don't say it. Please don't say it.” she went pale, looking up at him, pleading for one more moment of grace. “Leo, _please_.”

“Simmons.” And with that word they were undone.

“What did you remember?” she had to hold on to his kitchen counter to stay upright and selfishly, she hoped for one of their days at the Academy or working in their lab at the Bus. Something happy, something easy, anything but the med pod.

“You falling, me screaming, the virus. The Chitauri one.” The words tasted strangely familiar on his tongue. “I think that you were my best friend and I believe that I was in love with you and I know that you didn't tell me any of it. What else am I missing about us? How much?”

“Seven years.”

“I know that.” he snapped.

“Leo. Seven years.” she repeated slowly and he got it. His missing years had been with her, filled with her smile and her quick mind and the flecks of gold in her brown eyes, and they'd been about her and probably for her, and he couldn't look at her and he wanted to never stop looking at her and he was an idiot for falling in love with her twice over. Nothing about being angry at her felt right but she'd lied and then she'd kept on lying, and worst of all, she'd left him alone in that hospital bed three years ago. His logical mind was spinning apart into a hundred different pieces and he just _couldn't_ any longer.

“Seven years and you didn't think you should've told me? I can understand not saying anything the first time we met, but not telling me after we became friends—you owed me the truth by then, Jemma. And at the bed-and-breakfast, you just sat there and let me go on and on about you, knowing that you'd ripped me into pieces and not giving a shit.” A minute ago he'd been planning how to sneak in a kiss while she was cooking and now he couldn't get far enough away from her, retreating to the other side of the kitchen, body stiff.

“I never meant to hurt you. I wanted to let the past come back to you on its own terms, like it was supposed to.” she said defensively. “Studies have shown--”

“I don't care about the studies. I cared about you.” he interrupted. “I even thought that I was—it doesn't matter what I thought I was. But you could have given me my past and you kept it from me. You knew how I felt and you--” he couldn't find the right words, his tongue tripping over them like it hadn't in years, not since the accident, and he gasped for air again as he tried to remember the breathing exercises that the doctors had taught him.

“Did you really want to know everything? I remember that you told me that you thought maybe you needed the accident, to knock some sense into you. Did you want to have seven years thrown at you all at once?” she could feel the tears starting to well up now, hot and thick in her throat, and she swallowed hard trying to keep them down. “I thought it would be unfair, to walk into your life and demand so much of you, to shadow your new life with your old one. I was doing what I thought would be best for you, even if it hurt me.”

“You seemed to be doing fine without me.” he said coldly. Too late he remembered the way she'd looked talking about her partner, the grief he'd gotten a glimpse of that rainy January afternoon when she'd walked into his life the second time.

“Doing fine? I couldn't sleep more than a few hours at a time, I threw away a perfectly good relationship, Skye had to watch me eat to make sure that I didn't starve...I pulled myself together in the end but I was a mess and I'm not ashamed to admit it. We both screwed each other up.” she snapped.

“You were the one who left me. How could I have screwed you up when I didn't know you?” 

“You forgot me! You told me that you loved me and then you forgot me!” they were both shouting by then and her words echoed off the walls. He was about to reply when what she was saying sunk in and his jaw fell open. The Leo Fitz he had been before had been a coward then, like he'd always secretly suspected, and so he'd loved her silently for years and waited longer than he should have. He'd never even gotten to hear her response.

“We weren't...we didn't...what were we to each other, Jemma? What was I to you?” he asked.

“You were a good man, Leo. You were a hero.” she was really crying now, the tears streaming down her cheeks as she forced the words out and willed herself to stop. “And we loved each other in every way that we could—it just took us a while to be in the same place at the same time, like I told you. I wasn't sure then but I knew after you were gone and I know now. I lo--”

“Don't say it. God, I don't think I could bear it if you said it.” If she said it, he knew that he would be lost, adrift without the anger that was holding him up. His life wasn't what he thought it had been, the girl he loved wasn't who he thought she'd been, but the anger felt just as hot and brutal as it always had, from the moment he woke up in the hospital and found nobody there waiting for him except the TARDIS sitting by his bed.

“It doesn't have to be like this. I promise.” They were Fitzsimmons, she thought frantically. It wasn't allowed to end this way.

“I can't, Jemma. I'm sorry but I just can't trust you.” he fled then, slamming his bedroom door behind him, and left her to pick up the pieces. She fled too, running through the streets of London in her too-high heels and last night's dress, and as she realized that she didn't seem to have any tears left to cry, a dull sense of inevitability started to fill her: that as soon as Ward had pushed the button and let them fell, they had been over before they even started.

And a week and a half later, that same dull sense of inevitability filled her again as she sat in her bunk on the Bus and stared down at the tiny plus sign on her pregnancy test.


	9. Complications

“You should call him.”

“Skye.” Jemma pulled the covers up over her head and thought bitterly that this was where Leo Fitz always seemed to send her. Hiding under the covers in her bed and sobbing her heart out like she was five and scared of the dark again. “He said that he couldn't trust me. I don't think he ever wants to talk to me again.”

“I'm pretty sure he would want to hear about this.” Skye said carefully as she flopped down on the bed and turned to face Jemma, trying to hug her through the layers of blankets. “It's going to be okay.” She had absolutely no idea if that was true, but ever since she'd found Jemma slumped on the other side of the door to their hotel room, stubbornly refusing to cry, and ever since Jemma had realized that she was late, Skye had decided that what Jemma needed more than anything was someone to tell her it was okay. And possibly do all kinds of nasty psychic things to Leo Fitz. She didn't know what had happened that morning, only that he had remembered and it had been terrible, and even though in her nicer moments she was willing to concede that maybe both of them had screwed things up, she still had a burning need to kick the ass of anyone who made her best friend cry. “We're all here for you, whatever you want to do.” Skye added.

“I have no idea what I want to do.” Jemma confessed, pulling the comforter down so she could look at Skye. “I know I'm not ready...but it's his.” When she said his, Skye could hear years of longing and disappointment wrapped up in the word. 

“We have a little time. You're only a few weeks in, right?” Skye waited for Jemma's nod, then went on. “And no matter what you decide, I'll be here. Best friend contract and everything.” There was a knock on the half-open door and Trip appeared, effortlessly balancing two steaming ceramic mugs and a plate of brownies.

“I made tea. The brownies are store-bought. Should I come back another time?” Trip asked and Skye wondered how he managed to lean against the door in an attractive way and not be in danger of dropping anything.

“No, now's fine. Thank you, babe.” Skye got up to retrieve the tea and plant a kiss on Trip's cheek.

“Babe?” he raised an eyebrow at her.

“I'm trying it out!” she protested, letting him draw her in for a proper (one-handed) kiss before he sauntered out the door and she turned back to see Jemma giggling under her covers through her sniffles.

“You guys are really cute.” Jemma said, and ignored the stab of envy she felt at their easiness with each other. Trip had fallen for Skye as easily as a planet falls into orbit around a sun, while she and Leo seemed to have become more like two meteors colliding with each other, fiery and short.

“We got lucky.” Skye shrugged, trying to hide her blush, and offered up the plate of brownies to Jemma. “I'll let you have the biggest one if you call him.”

“Blackmail was definitely not in the best friend contract.” Jemma accused, laughing, and emerged from her pile of covers to grab at them. She knew perfectly well that Skye was trying to distract her and so she did her best to stop remembering how he'd looked at her before she'd left his apartment: his blue eyes clouded over and his hands trembling at his sides. She didn't want to imagine what he'd look like when she told him. Only she did anyway.

She was going to call him, she really was. But two weeks later, she woke up in the middle of the night with a sharp stabbing pain in her stomach and blood all over her sheets, and it was already too late.

Leo's phone rang at two in the morning and didn't stop ringing. He mostly answered it to make it stop, mumbling a half-asleep hello into the phone. Then he heard her name and he jolted awake. “What about Jemma? What's happened to her?”

“She's in the hospital. And even though you were a total asshole to her and didn't want anything to do with it, I thought you should know.” The voice on the other end was razor-sharp and wide awake.

“To do with what? Who is this?” he started digging around for a clean shirt, his wallet, his shoes, something. He'd never even questioned if he should go.

“This is Skye. Her teammate?” the girl on the other end sighed, and her voice sounded more and more familiar. You and Simmons are so tight, it's like you're psychically linked. The girl's voice echoed in his head, some fragment of a long-lost memory, and he realized that Skye (yes, that was her name) must have been his teammate too. “She really didn't call you?”

“I haven't heard from her in weeks. Not since...” He'd thought of calling her dozens of times, only to realize he didn't have her number, and wasted hours at work trying to get into SHIELD's secure database. He'd written her a hundred unsent emails and still didn't know what he wanted to say. On the other end of the line he heard Skye draw in a deep breath.

“Jemma was pregnant. From the night that she spent with you. She was going to tell you but I guess...” Skye took another deep breath. “She lost the baby tonight. There was a lot of blood, but the hospital says that she's going to be okay.” He was out the door by the time Skye started giving him the address of the hospital.

Skye was waiting for him by the entrance of the hospital, dressed all in black and her mouth pulled tight with worry. “I'm not taking back what I said, just so you know.” she said and glared at the door until it flew open.

“I didn't think you would. Is she okay?” If he focused on only Jemma being okay in this moment, at this precise time, he wouldn't have to think about how not okay they both really were. “Can I see her?”

“The doctor said that she'll be fine after a few weeks, if she stays in bed for the next few days and takes it slow after that.” Skye glared at another glass door and then at the widely yawning receptionist who sat in front of them.

“Visiting hours are over.” she grumbled.

“No, they aren't.” Skye leaned across the desk and looked at the receptionist, whose eyes immediately glazed over. “Let's go.”

“That was...” Impressive. Scary. Definitely superpower-level.

“I had a good teacher. My SO arranged for me to train with a well-known telepath. Possibly unstable, stuck in a tortured love triangle, but fabulous red hair. And pretty amazing control over her powers.” Skye pointed to one of the doors lining the hallway. “Jemma's in there. Let me know when you're going to leave?” He nodded and slipped inside, closing the door quietly behind him and still unsure what to say. But she was asleep, her brown hair falling across the pillow, and she looked far too peaceful for him to wake her up. So he left his shoes and jacket on the chair beside the bed and climbed in beside her.

And after everything, they still fit together—her head on his chest, legs and fingers tangled together—and after everything, she still reached for him in her sleep.


	10. Lost

Jemma woke up to a lingering ache in her stomach, warm sunlight falling across her covers, and a warmer body pressed against hers. She opened her eyes to a checked shirt and sandy curls and jerked upright too quickly, whimpering in pain. Leo. Leo was here. Which meant that someone must have called him, which meant that he knew, which meant that when he woke up, they wouldn't be able to run from this conversation anymore.

His blue eyes flickered open at her whimper and he reached for her almost automatically, pulling her against his side and rubbing her back. “How are you feeling?” he asked gently.

“I'm fine. The doctors said that the miscarriage,” she had to say the word carefully and slowly to keep from choking on it. “That it was complete, but I lost a lot of blood so they're keeping me here for observation for a few days.” She snuggled in against him so she won't have to see his face before she asked her next question, and he let her, his other hand stroking her hair. “Are you mad at me for not telling you?”

“I'm not mad about that. I understand why you didn't want to tell me after what happened. I wouldn't have wanted to tell me either.” he dropped a kiss against her hair. Only to comfort her, he told himself. He'd hold on to her for as long as she would let him. She would be gone in a few days and he would still be a mess of emotions over her but for a minute, it felt like they were living inside a bubble. Just them and the sunlight and their loss. “I still wish you had.”

“What would you have said, if I'd called you?” Would it still have taken a late-night call from the hospital to make him come see her?  
“I would have said that I'd be there for you for whatever you wanted to do. Despite everything that's happened. I'd probably have wasted at least ten minutes asking completely obvious questions, though. Just saying how over and over, and you'd tell me in your best scientist voice that it was a perfectly natural process.” he felt her laugh against his chest.

“We wouldn't have fought?” she murmured, still half-asleep.

“I hope not.” he liked to think that he would've done the decent thing, been brave like he'd always wanted to be and talked it through with her instead of shouting his way out of it. “Jemma, what were you going to do?”

“I honestly don't know. I have responsibilities, obligations, I couldn't have raised a child on the Bus...I wasn't even sure if I was ready to be a mom.” she said as she pushed herself up on her arms to look at him. She'd been responsible for hundreds of lives working to rebuild SHIELD yet when she tried to imagine being responsible for a child, she was filled with panic that she'd screw it all up. Besides, there were so many places she wanted to see, theories she wanted to test, gadgets she wanted to create, things she wanted to do before she settled down. Still, when she'd imagined doing all those things, she'd always imagined doing them with Leo. And even if she couldn't have him, she could have had a boy with blue eyes or a girl with his curls or someone with his same sense of wonder and excitement at everything from the way the stars looked in the Southern Hemisphere to the so-called new culinary invention of putting m&ms in the popcorn. Someone that would have grown up not knowing their father. “But the baby would have been a piece of you. So I...I don't know.” 

“That's all right.” He wanted to say something else, to promise her that he'd be there, that he'd forgiven her, only he couldn't make a promise that he knew he wouldn't keep. They lay there for a while longer in silence until his phone started buzzing and he glanced over at the clock, promptly pushing the covers off his side of the bed and swinging his feet onto the floor.

“You're leaving?” Jemma asked quietly.

“I have to go to work. I have an early morning meeting.” he said and scanned the floor for his shoes so he wouldn't have to meet her eyes.

“Are you going to come back?” she said and sat all the way up, suddenly self-conscious and pulling the blankets up to cover herself.

“I don't think that would be a good idea.” Leo shoved his hands deep into his pockets and slowly, painfully turned to face her. “You're leaving in a few days anyway and we're not...I'm not...we were never going to work out anyway, Jemma. You're a SHIELD agent, I'm a journalist, there's almost definitely a conflict of interest if I write any more stories about your research, or SHIELD's. You spend your days flying around the world on missions, I have a life here in London. It was never going to work out.” he repeated.

“A few weeks ago, you were willing to try. You could always come back to SHIELD.” she blurted out. “You've been remembering more, haven't you? When we were at the bed-and-breakfast, you remembered enough to work with me. And more would come back if we put you in familiar situations again...you're a genius, Leo, you could relearn it.” He stayed quiet and she tentatively put a hand on his back. “Do you still not trust me? Is that it?”

“I don't think SHIELD wants me anymore. They let me go after whatever happened to me. It wasn't a scuba diving accident, was it?” His nightmares had changed after that morning. He still dreamed about her falling and about her crying, only now he could see her face as she turned back to look at him before falling off the face of the earth or her face streaked with tears in a strange watery light. The accident had had something to do with water, he knew that. Water and dark and fighting to breathe.

“I think you should remember that on your own.”

“Why did you leave me, Jemma? If we were so much to each other, why did you let me go?” And there it was.

“We were in the middle of the SHIELD Civil War. Our resources were limited, there was a HYDRA operative around every corner, any of us could have died—you nearly did. We didn't have the resources or the time to try and restore your memory and HYDRA believed that you were dead, so the higher-ups thought that it would be safer for you to leave SHIELD. It was the kind of calculation that people do in the middle of a war. I'm sorry.” She liked to think that things would have been different in peacetime. If he'd lost his memory during a routine operation, she would have stayed by his side until he got everything back. She would have held on to him as tightly as she could. But instead she had had to help save the world, strange as that still sounded to her, and here he was slipping through her fingers again. “Please tell me that you understand. Even if you're not in SHIELD, maybe we could try again? I'll let you buy me another drink.” Jemma smiled weakly at him.

“I..I'm sorry too. I think it's just not meant to be right now. I'm not ready and I need...my past is still a haze and I need my present to be absolutely certain while I sort everything out. And everything about you is uncertain.” 

“Are you uncertain about everything you told me that night too?” His voice, whispering against her pulse. I think I might have been waiting for you my whole life. Please tell me that you'll stay.

“No. I meant every word.” He still did. “Not being ready doesn't mean that I don't--”

“I know. And I know you don't want to hear it, but I think we both need to.” Jemma buried her hands in the covers so he wouldn't see them shake. “I love you, Leo Fitz. I've loved you for years, knowing it and not knowing it, and I think I'll probably love you for the rest of my life. And I'm willing to wait for the promise of that someday when you get your head figured out. But I'm not willing to let you hide from the reality of us.”

“Someday.” he echoed her. “I'm sorry...I can't...but is there anything I can do now?”

“Would you stay until I fall asleep again? Skye probably had to go back to the Bus and I don't want to go to sleep alone.” She couldn't remember the last time she'd fallen asleep by herself, whether it was knowing that her team was only a few bunks away or tangled up in Leo's arms for that one night, and maybe it was silly but she didn't want to be left alone in this cold and unfamiliar room. It felt like an eternity before he finally nodded and untied his shoes, curling up beside her again, and she fell asleep almost instantly with his warmth against her.

Jemma woke up hours later to a teddy bear wearing a striped suit, Converse, and 3-D glasses and a short note on her bedside table.

_Jemma--_  
The bear's name is David. I hope you like him. Maybe the next time you come to London, you can let me know how you and he are getting on?  
Love,  
Leo


	11. Found

The flashes were more frequent than ever. He'd be on the Tube, he'd be furiously typing at his desk, he'd be walking home, he'd be making dinner, and then he suddenly wasn't. Instead he was in the flying lab again, or sitting on a couch watching a movie, or wandering across the campus of a school he didn't recognize. And she was always there. Frowning down at the test tube beside him, head leaning against his shoulder, gesturing as she talked about the latest studies in biochemistry. Her brown hair falling around her shoulders and glinting in the sunlight, her eyes bright and alive, her full mouth parting in one of the smiles she saved for him. Even in his flat, she was everywhere. Sprawled out on his couch and stealing his food, perched on the kitchen counter in that impossible dress, lying against his sheets as the memory of what had been the best night of his life infiltrated every room. Jemma and what she'd said to him in the hospital, groggy and in pain and braver than he had ever been, haunted him.

His boss assigned him to write another story about SHIELD and he told himself that situations like these were why he'd walked away from her. Then the physics jargon of the report he'd been skimming for the article suddenly assembled it into a series of sentences that he understood perfectly and he found himself wondering if SHIELD would really take him back. But Agent Leo Fitz was long gone, no matter how many devices Leo had started to build in his living room on the weekends. It was almost like his hands needed to move, to remember the weight of each different tool, to take things apart and put them back together again. He'd been picky about his tools, he remembered that, glaring at anyone besides Jemma who touched them. 

He was starting to remember the kind of man that he had been—brilliant, prickly, sometimes cowardly but brave when it counted (he hoped), easily fascinated, a little awkward. Sometimes different from the man he was now, sometimes the same. But one thing always stayed the same: he was madly in love with Jemma Simmons, had been since the moment they started talking on a slow train from Prague to Paris and would always be. And as he remembered more and more of her every day, he was surer and surer that he'd been a bloody idiot the day he'd walked away from her in the hospital.

He was out for dinner with his colleagues when he recognized the dessert sitting on the table and realized that they'd chosen Marie's restaurant. By the time he tried to hide, Marie was walking out from the kitchen and looking surprisingly cordial. They exchanged hellos and good to see yous and how are yous and awkward questions about the dog. She was engaged to one of the other chefs and radiantly happy about it, and so when he said his congratulations, he knew that he truly meant them. One thing she said in their brief conversation stuck in his mind though, when she asked him what ever happened with the scientist.

“It didn't work out. I'm too set in my ways, she's too busy saving the world.” he replied, trying to keep his voice light and even, like the voice of a man who hadn't questioned his decision a hundred times over. “We're waiting for the right time to try again.”

“I'm sorry to hear it. From the way you looked at her...it just seemed like you'd be willing to give up anything for her.” Marie's words kept on echoing in his head afterward, building into a sharp pulsing headache until he had to stop in the middle of his walk home and sit down on someone's front stoop.

That was when he remembered just how much he had been willing to give up for Jemma. Water all around them, the stabbing pain in his arm and, even worse, the pain in her eyes. The first law of thermodynamics. One breath for the both of them. You're more than that. And he knew, finally and absolutely, that there were no words for how much he loved her and that he would try to find them anyway.

So when he got home, he started making notes because that was what Leo Fitz did, like any good journalist and like any good scientist. He'd make notes and do research and compile his sources and he'd do anything and everything for the chance to tell Jemma Simmons that he was hers. Step one: call Skye, apologizing along the way, and find out where the team was. Step two: talk her into steering them back to London in a week or two. Step three: start watching his way through the romantic comedy pantheon. Step four: do better than all of them.

He finally got the message from Skye on a rainy Saturday afternoon, the kind where the drainpipe by his window gushed nonstop and the street became a sea of black umbrellas. _ETA one and a half hours. This had better be good, Leo._ He was out the door in record time, sprinting all the way to the Tube stop and fidgeting all the way to the end of the line, where he hailed a taxi and promptly wasted ten minutes arguing with the cabbie about the fare and the muddy roads. In the end, he walked the last quarter mile himself, only to end up facing two grim men with large guns. “Look, Agent Skye should have told you that I was coming. I've got authorization from her and everything.” he brandished his phone at them. “Do you really want to see what it's like when she gets angry?”

“We didn't get any authorization. You'll have to wait until they get back for Agent Skye to confirm that you're not a hostile.” One of the burly guards crossed his arms across his chest and planted himself in front of the door. “For now, we're going to ask you to step away from the airfield.”

“I'm not a hostile.” he snapped. “I'm Leopold Fitz, formerly an agent of SHIELD, and I nearly died in the line of duty, saving the woman that I love. And I've finally worked up the courage to stand there and tell her precisely how I feel years later than I should have. And since I can't run through an airport or anything--”

“Like in Love Actually.” one of the guards interrupted.

“Yes, sort of like Love Actually. So you see--” Really, he'd wanted to go for something more like Notting Hill. He was almost sure that Jemma had made him watch that movie over and over with her back at the Academy.

“I love Love Actually.” the guard interrupted again. “That bit where Hugh Grant goes down the street ringing all the doorbells so he can find her...My wife and I watch it every Christmas.”

“So do I! We all love Love Actually!” Leo said with a touch of desperation. “You can have a guard on me the whole time I'm in there, whatever you want. Just please let me in and let me tell her.” And to his amazement, the guard moved away from the door, punched in a code, and ushered him in, shrugging when the other guard asked him why and mumbling something about his wife's reaction if he stood in the way of true love. Then they were sprinting to the airfield and clearing a space by the runway for the lights and he hoped desperately that his engineering skills hadn't failed him.

“Jemma!” Skye shouted, bursting through the glass door of the lab. “Jemma, come look right now!”

“I'll be there in a minute, S—” She was cut off when Skye grabbed her arm and dragged her upstairs to a window, shedding sample dishes along the way.

“Jemma, _look_.” Skye pointed down at the airfield and let out a low whistle. “I didn't think the boy had it in him.” There were lights on the ground—spotlights, spare runaway lights, high-powered flashlights, even some Christmas lights—and their message shone out for miles around: I LOVE YOU, JEMMA SIMMONS.

He was standing there when they landed, mud streaks on his jeans, curls sticking straight up in the wind, and his jacket soaked through from the rain. Jemma thought that she'd never loved the way he looked more. “Leo?” she asked, standing at the edge of the ramp as May lowered it.

“I love you, Jemma Simmons.” he shouted over the wind. “You are the best thing that's ever happened to me and I love you!”

“What happened? What changed?” she asked slowly.

“Slow train from Prague to Paris. You trying to get drunk and never succeeding. Buffalo mozzarella and prosciutto with a hint of homemade pesto aioli. The extra ounce on the night-night gun. You've been beside me the whole damn time. You'll never have to find out, beside that pool in California.” he swallowed hard, and went on. “The pod. You're more than that. All this time I thought that you let me go but you dragged me up from the bottom of the ocean because you refused to let me die.”

“You remembered.” she breathed.

“Bits and pieces. But enough to know that walking away from you twice was the biggest mistake I've ever made. Because you are brave and beautiful and brilliant and kind and strong—you're everything good, Jemma. And I've been in love with you from the moment we first talked on that train, probably even from the moment I first saw you, and I loved you for all the years after it, even when I was too afraid of losing you to admit it. I loved you when I didn't even know that you existed and, if you'll let me, I'll love you for every day I have left.” he took another step toward her. “I know it won't be easy, but I think that good things rarely are. And this...us...it would be the most wonderful thing I can possibly imagine. You're my missing piece, Jemma, the one thing that makes me complete. And I'm yours, however you'll have me. If you'll have me?” She was kissing him before he could say anything else, her mouth slanted against his and her hands tangled in his curls, and it was a long time before he pulled back, gasping, to ask her. “So that's a yes?”

“Of course that's a yes. Some genius you are.” she said, laughing, and leaned her head on his shoulder. 

“Good. I was going to pull out Notting Hill if you didn't say anything right away. You know--I'm just a boy standing in front of a girl asking her to love him.” he told her.

“Leo Fitz, you were not going to pull out Notting Hill.” 

“I just did.” he said smugly and kissed her again until they were both breathless. They didn't even realize that it had started raining again, soaking through their clothes as they clung to each other, until Skye shouted at them to stop reenacting The Notebook before they got pneumonia.

“Do you want to come inside?” Jemma asked. “We can make some tea, tour the Bus, talk about what comes next...”

“Yes.” Leo said and bent down to kiss her again. “Yes to everything.” He wrapped his arm around her waist and as they walked towards the Bus together, he smiled at the wonderful, dizzying thought of the years and years of being madly in love with Jemma Simmons that lay ahead of him.

Six Months Later  
They really weren't supposed to be in the lab that night. According to the system they'd worked out with Coulson, they spent half their time on the Bus, him writing his column (Dispatches from SHIELD) when he wasn't with her in the Lab, and the rest of their time working from the Playground, dealing with whatever the field teams couldn't handle and sent back for analysis. He was out grocery shopping and so she'd thought that she could sneak off to the lab. Instead he found her, coming in with bags full of groceries, firmly told her that it was far too late to be in the lab, and kissed her senseless against their main workbench until the sample she'd been working on was long forgotten.

In the past six months, Jemma Simmons had lost countless nights of sleep because of Leo Fitz but, waking up the next morning to rumpled sheets and the golden light that streamed through their windows, she thought that sleep was overrated. She rolled over to reach for him and frowned when all she felt was a mess of pillows. “Leo?” she called. “Come back to bed.”

“I'm getting the paper. Be back in a minute. Breakfast is on the kitchen table.” he said from the kitchen. She found his shirt in the pile of their clothes on the floor and buttoned it halfway, wondering how he'd managed to wake up before she did and wandering into the kitchen.

There was a tray on the kitchen table, with a plate of French toast, a pitcher of syrup, a glass of orange juice, and a vase of daisies. And sitting right beside her fork was a small black velvet box, cracked open just enough to see the ring sparkling inside. “Leo?” she managed to say slowly. “Is this what I think it is?” _Please tell me that it is._

He burst in and stopped short, looking sheepish. “Shit, I knew I was forgetting something. I'm sorry, Jemma--I had a whole big speech ready and I had proper flowers too. There was going to be a whole day and then at dinner I was going to pull out the ring and--” Then he looked at her eyes, wide and bright, and moved to slip his hands through hers. “Do you like it?”

“I love it.” she whispered.

“I didn't want it to be just a ring.” he blurted out. “I wanted it to be everything you are to me and everything I want with you. Doctor Who marathons on the couch and you turning cheese and bread into a gourmet meal and long days at the lab and longer nights falling asleep next to you and the way you sigh when I kiss you and knowing that every day will be better than the last. I want forever, Jemma. So does it say that? Will you marry me?”

“Yes.” she said simply. “Yes to everything.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's all, folks! Thank you for reading, commenting, and coming along on this adventure!


End file.
